Serious question: how can we go about making archaic programming languages and dialects of assembly more accessible?
There are all these cool, historically significant programs that are open-sourcing: DOS, this, etc. Is there any way to expose the general program structure and algorithms so that they're easier to analyze without learning the specific language they're written in?
Last Christmas, I used an RPi to build a dial-up WiFi modem for my Grandma, who lives in a rural area where dial-up is the only Internet option, but still wants to download books onto her Kindle (requires WiFi, but not fast speeds).
Was fairly straightforward--required just a USB dial-up modem, WiFi card, switch with some lights, a case, and a little Python programming. Oddly enough, the hardest part of the whole setup was "reverse engineering" what the proprietary Netscape dial-up app was doing with her password before sending it out--turned out it was lowercasing it! Facepalmed real hard there. After figuring that out, everything worked in Linux beautifully.
There are all these cool, historically significant programs that are open-sourcing: DOS, this, etc. Is there any way to expose the general program structure and algorithms so that they're easier to analyze without learning the specific language they're written in?